12 Feb How Managed Services can help you scale

As your business scales, you reach a point when you can no longer operate from cobbled together spreadsheets, email chains, or even lists on notepaper to keep track of your customers. In short, your business has to grow up. But the period between being a brand-new startup and a mature business is full of tough questions. Who do you hire first? Do you seek investment or continue to bootstrap? Do you hire employees or contractors? This question is especially relevant as you scale up your sales and service organizations and begin to use Salesforce. Simplus recommends using Managed Services for Salesforce, but why? Why not just hire and build from the ground up? There are a couple of lessons from other industries that can be applied to the case in favor of starting with Managed Services: expertise and lower costs.

Expertise

A few years ago, I read a story about a clinic that performs hernia surgeries. There are many clinics that fix hernias, but this clinic in particular is unique because they only do hernia surgeries. Nothing else. This has a couple of unique benefits. Because the surgeons only do this one surgery, they end up performing more of them in a year than a general surgeon will likely perform in a lifetime. Costs are half the average, and surgeries are done twice as fast. All the repetition apparently changes the way they think: the surgeons become accustomed to dealing with nonstandard situations in an automatic mode. By solely focusing on this one thing, they are exposed to the widest possible range of problems and issues, and become experts in situations that general surgeons would be novices.

These surgeons exemplify the benefits of specialization: lower costs and higher skill. The same benefits are found when using Simplus’ Managed Services. While your problems may seem new or unique, it’s highly likely that we’ve dealt with the same issues before. And if we haven’t seen your issue, we can bring our extensive experience to bear. Tapping into that know-how is extremely valuable.

Historically, a developer would have to pay for an instance from a cloud server to be able to run web applications, even if the application was only running a small set of functions. This was expensive, and often felt like you were paying for a Ford F-150 when all you needed was a scooter. Amazon, having received that feedback, began offering AWS Lambda, which enables developers to run code without having to provision entire servers. This has greatly empowered creators to run smaller, simpler functions without having to incur steep costs. The lower barrier to entry has been a boon for anyone looking to test a smaller idea or function, especially for those developing internet of things devices like the Amazon Echo or Google Home.

The AWS Lambda example illustrates the benefits of holding off on infrastructure costs, especially during a ramp-up period. Rather than dropping a large amount of money to start, relying on Managed Services enables you to pay as you go and as you need. This gives you the flexibility to understand the infrastructure that you will actually require as you scale, or it will become clear that your needs fluctuate too much to develop your own solution.

There are many concerns when a new team begins to use a new service, and Salesforce is no exception to the rule. Thankfully, you can tap into years of experience and avoid steep infrastructure costs by using Managed Services. Those tough choices you ask yourself as you scale up your business can be simplified, making your life even just a little bit easier.

That’s why Simplus offers Managed Services for your Salesforce implementation. Bring our years of experience to bear for your organization and give us a call.

How Managed Services can help you scale was last modified: March 20th, 2018 by amyc